quotations about money
If I can acquire money and also keep myself modest and faithful and magnanimous, point out the way, and I will acquire it.
EPICTETUS
The Discourses of Epictetus with the Encheiridion and Fragments
There is no sacrifice which men will not make for money. They will face belching cannon, clog their lungs with the dust of coal-mines or with the impalpable powder inhaled in the grinding of steel, become workers in arsenic, lead, phospherous, or any of the other substances so fatal to life, blast with gun-powder, live amid malaria, and risk their soul's peace in this world and the next, for gold. No toil is so exhausting, no danger so appalling, that men will not confront the one and undergo the other, if the stakes are only sufficiently high. "A certain ten percent," says an English economist, "will insure the employment of capital anywhere. Twenty percent certain will produce eagerness. Fifty percent, positive audacity. One hundred percent will make it ready to trample on all human laws. Three hundred percent, and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged." Even the preacher's call swells from "the still small voice" to a trumpet peal when it comes from the offer of a double salary. Harassing doubts and indecision vanish like a dew before the logic of five thousand a year and a parsonage. The parish that is made up of rich merchants, brokers, and capitalists, is seen to be "a larger field of labor" when viewed through gold spectacles.
WILLIAM MATHEWS
"Money--Its Use and Abuse", Hints on Success in Life
The wealthy seldom possess wealth: oftener they are possessed by it.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
No illusion is more crucial than the illusion that great success and huge money buy you immunity from the common ills of mankind, such as cars that won't start.
LARRY MCMURTRY
Some Can Whistle
Money often costs too much.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Conduct of Life
Money is the curse of mankind. It smothers the seed of everything great and good. Every penny is sticky with sweat and blood.
JOSEPH GOEBBELS
"Nationalsozialisten aus Berlin und aus dem Reich", Voelkischer Beobachter, February 4, 1927
It is easy, of course, to point out the dangers resulting from a too intense devotion to money-getting. Bacon calls riches "the baggage of virtue"; and we all know how the Romans, in their heroic days, when they annihilated their foes, expressed their contempt by a similar word, impedimenta; and that when they grew weak and degraded they clung to their gold, with which they bought off the barbarians who invaded them. But whatever may be said of the dangers of riches, the dangers of poverty are tenfold greater. A condition in which one is exposed to continual want, not only of the luxuries but of the veriest necessaries of life, as well as to disease and discouragement, is exceedingly unfavorable to the exercise of the higher functions of the mind and soul. The poor man is hourly beset by troops of temptations which the rich man never knows. Doubtless the highest virtues are sometimes found to flourish even in the cold clime and sterile soil of poverty. Not only industry, honesty, frugality, perseverance amid hardships and ever-baffling discouragement, severe self-sacrifice, tender affections, unwavering trust in Providence, all are formed blooming in the hearts of the poorest poor--even in the sunless regions of absolute destitution, where honesty might be expected to wear an everlasting scowl of churlishness, and a bitter disbelief in the love of God to accompany obedience to the laws of man. But it is the most insufferable of all cants to hear these qualities spoken of as if they were indigenous to poverty, when we know that they flourish in spite of it.
WILLIAM MATHEWS
"Money--Its Use and Abuse", Hints on Success in Life
If you wish to test a friend loan him money.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Feelings about money -- saving and spending, holding back and letting go -- start very early in our lives. Stingy people have often been forced to give when they were very, very young, when they weren't ready. And generous people have often been really appreciated when they were very young.
FRED ROGERS
"Mister Rogers' Money Tips", The Motley Fool, January 20, 2006
But the merchant, if faithful to his principles, always employs his money reluctantly for any other purpose than that of augmenting itself.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
The lack of money is the root of all evil.
MARK TWAIN
Mark Twain's Notebook
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex. You thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
JAMES BALDWIN
"The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy", Esquire, May 1961
Money spent withdraws its charm.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
In matters of money there's no such thing as enough.
JEAN ANOUILH
Thieves' Carnival
The jingling of a fat purse always commands the world.
DAVID GERROLD
Under the Eye of God
One just spends as much money as one has. Very peculiar that! You never actually have any money. You think, If I had this much money ten years ago, I would have thought I was amazingly rich, but I still manage to spend it all and not have any left.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Paris Review, winter 1997
Of what use is wealth to him who neither gives nor enjoys it? Riches are for the comfort of life, and not life for the accumulation of riches. There is no man more deserving of pity than he who spends his whole life amassing money, without making any use of it.
JAMES PLATT
Platt's Essays, vol. II
Money is the source of the greatest vice, and that nation which is most rich, is most wicked.
FRANCES BURNEY
The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney
If you want to know what's really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty.
JARON LANIER
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
You can be young without money, but you can't be old without it.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof